Fri, Apr 22, 2005
Wal-Mart, Meijer Commentary
#
GbengaAjilore, one of my oldest friends in the world and an economics
professor at the University of Toledo, was
quoted on the
Wal-Mart versus Meijer battles. For you non-Midwesterners, if you've never been to
Meijer, it's a sight to behold -- acres of everything you might
possibly need, open 24 hours a day. Just don't buy anything there when
you visit. (IO0)
/personal |
Posted at 7:49am
Tue, Apr 19, 2005
Jhai Foundation Seeks Tech Volunteers
#
AllenGunn forwarded this call for help from LeeThorn, chair of the
JhaiFoundation, which is doing great work in developing countries and
rural communities and which instigated the
Jhai PC and Communication
System. (LeeFelsenstein, someone I've admired for a long time, is
actively involved.) They're currently seeking: (INU)
Software development volunteers with experience in relationship
websites and wikis who would like to help me and others in our group
to conceive, create and manage websites that will 1/help technologists
doing work in alternative power and low power computing communicate
and co-create; and 2/help local non-governmental groups across the
world talk with each other about their successes and ask each other
for help, whether or not they have facility in English. (INV)
Contact lee-at-jhai-dot-org if you're interested in helping. (INW)
/forbenefit |
Posted at 11:32am
Fri, Apr 15, 2005
"Introduction to XDI" PowerPoint
#
AndyDale and his team at ooTao have written
the first implementation of the XDI data sharing protocol, which
IdentityCommons will use for profile sharing. As important a step
that this is, Andy's best contribution to date, in my opinion, has
been his excellent
"Introduction to XDI" PowerPoint
slides, which he
recently updated. (IMU)
Last month, I spent an intensive day with Andy, SteveChurchill, and
OwenDavis reviewing the XDI architecture. It was very enlightening,
and it gave me greater faith in the decision to use XDI for data
sharing and link contracts. Of course, I still had my gripes. I
recorded some notes and observations at XdiDataSharing. (IMV)
/collaboration/idcommons |
Posted at 11:04am
Thu, Apr 14, 2005
Ghosts of Sokal
#
Three MIT graduate students -- JeremyStribling, DanielAguayo, and
MaxwellKrohn -- wrote a computer
program to autogenerate a "research paper" entitled,
"Rooter: A Methodology
for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." They
submitted it to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics
(WMSCI). It was accepted. (IML)
The
CNN article about their accomplishment noted that it was
reminiscent of the infamous AlanSokal hoax. Sokal submitted a fake
paper to a postmodern scholastic journal,
Social Text (not to be
confused with RossMayfield's company),
and the paper was accepted. Sokal wanted to show that postmodernism
was a farce, but what he ended up demonstrating was that peer review
was incredibly flawed. (IMM)
The "Rooter" paper isn't the first fake paper to be accepted at a
scientific journal or conference, but it's the first to my knowledge
that was computer-generated. It's not that hard to point out the
problems with peer review. What's more interesting to me are
effective alternatives that challenge our assumptions.
Wikipedia is an obvious example, but
arXiv.org is a much more compelling one. (IMN)
In any case, many thanks to Jeremy, Daniel, and Maxwell for giving me
a good chuckle. Please donate to their cause so that they can deliver a randomly-generated
talk at the conference. (IMO)
/collaboration |
Posted at 7:51pm
Observations from Portals 2005
#
When I worked at DrDobbsJournal, I did the software development
and IT conference circuit regularly. Most of those conferences were
incredibly boring, but they were rarely a waste of time. What made
them compelling were the attendees. (IM0)
I've been spoiled in the six years since. Not only have the
conferences I've attended been more diverse and interesting, many of
them have exploited collaborative processes that emphasized
participant interaction. That's obviously an advantage if the reason
you're attending is to meet interesting folks. Additionally, most of
these events were more about social good rather than corporate
productivity. As a result, the energy is much more positive. (IM1)
Attending Portals, Collaboration,
and Content Management 2005 these past few days was a blast to the
past for me, which was exactly why I chose to attend. I wanted to
reconnect with the corporate IT community and discover what they were
thinking about these days, especially regarding collaboration. I also
wanted to test my ideas with this crowd, to see if I still remembered
the language of this community and if my message would fly. (IM2)
I gave the first talk in the
collaboration track, and it was very well received, moreso than I
expected. There was a snafu with the program, which listed my talk as,
"Collaboration: What's In It For Me," when the actual title was,
"Collaboration: What The Heck Is It?" One woman approached me
afterwards and told me that she was originally planning on attending
my talk, then saw what the real title was and decided to attend a
different one instead. Afterwards, she ate lunch with several people
who did attend my talk, and much to her chagrin, they raved about it. (IM3)
Several people told me they enjoyed the interactivity of my
presentation. That was intentional. It engaged the audience, and it
gave me a chance to learn from them. My plan wasn't to teach, it was
to stretch people's minds, to give them an opportunity to think about
things in new ways. (IM4)
Folks who know me well or read this blog regularly know how much I
tout highly interactive conferences. I think there is a huge
opportunity for such an event for IT workers. I heard very little
that interested me in the conference tracks. The attendees were far
more interesting than the speakers, and most of my learning occurred
during the meals. Several people even said as much, completely
unprovoked by me. (IM5)
Some other observations: (IM6)
- I ran into a number of people who had been with their companies for
15 years or longer. One person suggested that the reason for this
was that companies liked to put their most experienced people in
charge of portals. It makes perfect sense. These folks have an
innate understanding of the organizational dynamics, which portals
should parallel. (IM7)
- KaliyaHamlin
suggested that people attending this conference would be really
interested in IdentityCommons. Sure enough, several people said
they were looking for good SingleSignOn solutions. However, despite
my active involvement and evangelism with IdentityCommons, I don't
think IdentityCommons provides what these people are looking for
right now. The real value of IdentityCommons as an identity
solution is inter-organizational, whereas most IT people are dealing
with intra-organizational problems. (IM8)
- I was blown away by the proliferation of SharePoint in
organizations. During my talk, several audience members realized
that they were all dealing with similar challenges with SharePoint,
so they gathered afterwards to discuss. I discovered many others
in similar situations. I mentioned this to some folks at the
SAP Netweaver
booth, and they said they were blown away by the same observation.
SharePoint seems to be making real viral headway in organizations,
largely from the bottom-up. Ironically, some IT people are
expressing the same misgivings about SharePoint as they do about
OpenSource software. (IM9)
- I love warm, summer nights. Yes, I realize it's still spring. An
April evening in Phoenix is about equivalent to a July evening
in LosAngeles. (IMA)
/events |
Posted at 6:27pm
Mon, Apr 11, 2005
Collaboration Talk in Phoenix
#
I'll be giving a talk on Tuesday --
"Collaboration: What the Heck Does It Mean?" -- at the
Portals, Collaboration and Content
Management Conference at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Yes, the title is
wrong in the program.) It's a more refined version of the
talk I gave late last
year for the 2005 Reuters
Digital Visions Fellows at Stanford. Fitting that I'll be speaking
in Phoenix, because the kernel of this talk emerged from my
ChiliPLoP
workshop in beautiful Carefree, Arizona almost exactly one year ago
today. You can download the
slides. (ILQ)
In addition to meeting folks at the conference, I'm looking forward to
catching up with LindaRising, who's recent book,
Fearless
Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, is getting some
excellent buzz, including from my former DrDobbsJournal
colleague, MikeSwaine. My turnaround is pretty quick -- I'm flying
back to SanFrancisco on Wednesday afternoon -- but if you're in the
area and would like to meet up, let me
know. (ILR)
/events |
Posted at 5:47pm
Sat, Apr 09, 2005
Purple Peeper-Eater
#
I've been following NancyWhite's excellent
blog for many moons
now. She writes great things about OnlineCommunities? and
collaboration, and her blog is my most heavily bookmarked on
Bloglines. So it seems a bit
strange that the
first item of hers I'm going to mention here is this very funny
reference to Purple
Peeper-Eaters. One can never get too much
Purple
humor. (ILA)
/tech/purple |
Posted at 8:21am
